I am most inclined to believe that Mukasey is lying, rather than that the NSA intercepted a phone call and was too damn honorable or lazy to listen to it, even though it legally could. Come on, these guys thrive on information, that's their purpose. If they legally and technologically can get info on anyone or anything, they will. If you consider the confused response to the 9/11 attacks, when even while the towers were crumbling, the administration had no clue what was going on and F-15s were in the air looking for Soviet nuclear bombers, it becomes plain that no revealing phone calls were intercepted. Mukasey blatantly made shit up and will lie about making it up soon enough.

You see, as usual in this administration, it's far more preferable to admitting to incompetence (what are they going to do, fire him?) or criminality. Lying in public about important things is not criminal. Failing to prevent 9/11 is. End of story.

At this point, I've lost count of how many times this administration has violated the Constitution, common sense, rules of reason or actual law. It's an unending streak of incompetence mingled with brazen, criminal dereliction of duty. And they are so careless with revealing it to the general public because, truly, NOTHING will be done to them. The chief perpetrators will never go to trial, and if they will, there is pardon waiting for them.

(Imagine: Bush and Co. are brought to trial for violating Constitutional law and found guilty. Will President Obama let them go to jail? Hell no, he will pardon them, Ford-like, in order to achieve "reconciliation", i.e. not piss off the Republican party too much. Even he will do so. Clinton will likely sign up as their defense attorney. Gah.)

It's occurred to me some time ago (and likely has been obvious to many for a long, long time) that this administration has only two motivating factors when it comes to surveillance, and neither of them has to do with protecting America. Number One, of course, is the unchecked ability to monitor its political opponents and stifle dissent in Congress, in the media and among political appointees that still retain even the minimum of integrity. Number Two is the ability to avoid jail (or even just trial and exposure) for crimes committed in the early days since 9/11, when this government was desperate to show us that it was working to protect us and grabbing random people in an illegal fashion.

I would say that given the rapidly changing political climate, Number One is starting to matter less and less, while Number Two is starting to rise in prominence. These folks know that if they haven't lost yet, they will lose soon, and there's a good possibility that the Trial of the Century just might occur while they're still among the living. Hence the Gordian knot of laws, signing statements and executive orders that they hope will prove impossible to unravel for the next party in power. In other words, I believe very strongly that whenever this administration is demanding the legalization of something freaky, e.g. torture, warrantless surveillance, whatever, it means they already did it, they did it a lot, there is a paper trail and they want to make it legal retroactively so that they won't go to jail for it. Pure and simple.

Five bucks says the same folks who were gleefully jumping all over Spitzer are going to spend endless airtime wringing their hands about how "the liberal media" are pouncing on poor, defenseless Vitter, and how they (the liberal media) should focus on "issues" rather than "hounding" members of Congress.

Note the particular brilliance on my part that it took to make this rather bold and unexpected prediction. After all, who would EVER think that the conscientious and serious commentators populating our TV and radio would act like so. Inconceivable!